


These Defining Moments

by themus



Category: The OC
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Cage Fights, Canonical Character Death, Explicit Language, Foster Care, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Parent-Child Relationship, Past Child Abuse, Post-Finale, Pre-Series, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-26
Updated: 2006-10-26
Packaged: 2019-02-23 02:44:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13180719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themus/pseuds/themus
Summary: There were times that he was convinced that his life could be measured by the lessons he learned, and that he could be quantified by what it had cost him.





	These Defining Moments

**Author's Note:**

> Written for The OC fandom Advent Challenge on Livejournal.  
> It was written before the Season 4 premiere, when all we knew was from the teasers was cage-fighting and Mexico, which is why the ending of this fic does not quite align with canon.

  
 

_Blue_

Everything is blue. The fire raging behind him should be warm and yellow but everything Ryan sees is tinted in blue – cobalt and steel, the dark of ocean depths grating against each other. Marissa's face isn't still any more. It shifts under the changing shadows, the flickering of lights, navy coloured flames licking up the side of her brow where the dark mass of blood has stopped flowing. He holds her, sitting here in the midst of this midnight blue asphalt, while the sky above reflects back that same hue, trapping him in this space without time or distance. He cannot measure reality. There is nothing here but the shifting shades of darkness and his breathing, soft and slow. Ryan can feel the stiffness creeping into his limbs, hers, a tension between them that feels unnatural and strange. He sweeps a hand across her face, his fingers vivid indigo with cold and trembling, so numb that he can't feel her, and he stops, his fingers resting there; blue against blue.

He is frozen – a man made of ice and stone - unmoving, unmoveable.

  
 

“ _It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.”_

Once, when Ryan was really small - when his father was still a foreboding presence in the house and his mother still tried to cook every day – once, he'd been a painter. He used to sit at the kitchen table with his collection of water-based paints – the ones that came in big plastic pots that his mother had to mix up for him out of the powder because he couldn't reach the faucet. Ryan would grab the biggest, thickest brush at the table and dip it into a colour, letting it soak up into the bristles until the tool was a cheery mass of viridian green or plum purple, and then he'd swirl it on the piece of paper which seemed so big to him back then.

Sometimes, if they didn't have any scrap paper in the house, his mother would cut off large sections from an extra roll of wallpaper which had never been used, and Ryan would paint on the back of that instead – creating huge blobbed landscapes with giant stick people as tall as the house next to them. And he always drew a chimney with swirly smoke coming out of it even though they didn't have a chimney, because Trey said that houses should always have a chimney. Ryan thought they needed one for Santa to come down, although he knew Trey didn't think that, since Trey didn't believe in Santa any more. Ryan was starting not to believe in Santa either, but he still always drew a chimney. And he drew their family: his father the tallest with two little brown dots for eyes; his mother next with her curly yellow hair; then Trey, who was either smiling widely or scowling depending on how much he had picked on Ryan that day; and then himself, barely half the height of Trey, with a little scruffy patch of yellow for his hair.

The rest of the picture was always the best part, because Ryan could go wild with birds and kites and big round green trees, and he usually painted Trey a neat new navy blue bike like he'd always wanted, and a smaller matching orange one for himself. Sometimes he painted a big shiny red car for his father, too. He never painted the bottles of brown liquid or his father's black leather belt. Instead Ryan used all the bright colours – oranges and yellows and purples and blues. He used every colour except for pink, because pink was for girls and Trey would make fun of him if he made anything pink. He wouldn't stop painting until the paper was a mass of bright, happy swirls and splodges. He didn't really care that it didn't look much like what it was supposed to, even when Trey laughed at it, because Ryan knew what it showed – it was a big canvas of a better life, a picture of vivid happiness. There was no marbled purple-black of bruises, or the puckered white of scars, or the deep, pulsing red of cigarette burns.

Then one day his father was taken away with a swirling of blue and red, and soon after that they left, packed up and moved away in a frenzy of his mother's bright energy. It wasn't until a few weeks later that Ryan realised she hadn't brought his paints, but by then he knew that covering sorrow with brightness never made anything better.

  
 

_Curve_

The van comes to a screaming halt across the tarmac, burning a sharp, ebony curve of rubber into the surface. It destroys the silence, the embracing blue, and now it's red, yellow, orange – a kaleidoscope of raging colours that are making Marissa bleed, turning her features harsh and angular. Then Volchok is above him, shouting wild syllables that cannot penetrate the void Ryan exists in, empty and soulless. Ryan pulls Marissa close, and her face falls soft again under his shadow, arcs and contours safe in the blue where there is nothing but them. But Volchok tries to touch her, take her from him, pull her out of his numb hands. And she is ripped from him, away, away from the safe blue, away from the timeless space. Her body is a piece of jagged metal, shimmering gold in the light. Volchok is red when Ryan knocks him down, red with the light, and the anger and the blood which flies from Ryan's own hands, too. Because he took her, and he took the blue, and he took the calm nothingness in which Ryan existed.

He is searing - a man made of fire and flame - unstopping, unstoppable.

  
 

_A smile is a curve that sets everything straight._

Ryan was in fourth grade the first time he fell in love. She was his History teacher, Miss Walker. She was young - or younger than his mother, at least - and pretty, and she smiled at him. Miss Walker smiled proper smiles, too – none of the simpering, watery smiles that he got from his mother, or the condescending tight smiles he got from other teachers, but a genuine, soft quirk of the lips whenever he did something to please her, which was often. Ryan hadn’t realised before her that he was worthy of smiles like that. He never seemed to please his mother any more. But Miss Walker was happy with him all the time: when he read aloud in class, slowly and carefully trying out the big words that he hadn’t seen before; or when he neatly coloured in his map of the world, even though he’d had to use yellow for all the continents because Theresa wouldn’t give him the green pencil, and purple for the oceans when the blue snapped and she wouldn’t lend him the sharpener.

Miss Walker was nice, and talked _to_ him quietly, instead of _at_ him loudly like Trey, and his mother, and his mother’s new boyfriend. Miss Walker explained things and didn’t get mad if he didn’t understand it straight away – although he usually did. And Miss Walker said he was smart, and a good boy, and that he always tried really hard. Since everyone else told him the exact opposite, Ryan thought she was probably lying, but if she was doing it to be nice it meant she liked him, and that was okay as long as he was careful not to believe her.

Ryan had studied Miss Walker very closely before he'd decided that he liked her. He wasn't used to liking adults, really, except for his mother, because she was his mother, and he couldn't not love her if he tried – and he didn't know why he'd ever do that. But Miss Walker was always soft and quiet and understanding. She was quite slim, and when it was warm she wore pretty dresses with flowers or butterflies on. And she always smelled nice, and not too much. When Ryan's mother used perfume it was always really thick and choking and made him feel sick. Plus, he wasn't sure that his mother even owned any dresses. He'd asked Trey once and Trey had laughed and said that she probably couldn't fit in them any more, and that she'd wear them if she could because it would be quicker for the guys she met. Ryan hadn't asked him to explain what that meant, because Trey had that sneer on his face that he always had when he was saying something disgusting, which he did a lot that year.

It took Ryan a long time to understand – almost that whole first year in Miss Walker’s class – to finally get that the reason he got tickly butterflies in his gut when he thought about her; why he felt all warm when she put a friendly hand on his shoulder or ran her hand through his hair was because he was in love with her. He didn’t want to kiss her or anything like that, even though she was a grown up and didn’t have cooties, but he liked being in her company because she always had time for him and was always nice to him. Trey said it was because she was a teacher and she was paid to be nice to the kids, but Ryan knew that wasn't it, because lots of the other teachers had no patience for him at all, even in class – especially when he was tired because he'd been up all night listening to his mother screaming at the latest guy, or if the latest guy had ripped up his homework, because for some reason they liked to do that. Sometimes some of the teachers yelled at him just as bad as his mother's boyfriends.

Some days, when he wasn't in the mood for Theresa's version of friendship, Ryan ate lunch with Miss Walker and he told her about stuff. Not big stuff, just little stuff, like what he and Theresa had done at her house that weekend, or interesting things he read in books. And Miss Walker listened to him, like he was a person, like he was worth listening to. On those days Miss Walker would always swap him parts of her lunch. Ryan usually had peanut butter when Trey made his lunch, and he didn't really like peanut butter, but Miss Walker loved it, so she would have half of his sandwich, and he would have half of hers. She thought Ryan didn't know that she made plain cheese sandwiches simply because he liked them best, but he had caught onto that part early.

What Ryan hated most was making Miss Walker sad. It upset him almost as much as it did when he made his mother cry, or Trey really, properly mad at him. The problem was that despite how smiley Miss Walker was, Ryan tended to make her sad a lot. Every couple of months, when Dave or John or Alex or whoever got a bit careless and hit him in the face, and Ryan had to go to class with a black eye or a split lip or both, then Miss Walker would get sad. The first time it happened Miss Walker almost cried when she kept him after class to get the story out of him. When Ryan just stood there looking at his feet, telling her over and over that he was fine, that he just fell off his bike, he could hear the strain in her voice like his mother got when she was near tears. He couldn’t look her in the face for a week afterwards.

After that, whenever Ryan came to school with bruises, or couldn't quite suppress the wince if someone clapped him on the back, Miss Walker looked nothing but sad and worn out, and Ryan hated himself for making her like his mother. On those days Miss Walker would always keep him behind and listen patiently to whatever story Ryan could come up with, about falling down steps or bumping into cupboards or some mythical fistfight with Trey. And she would smile at him, sad, and tell him that everything would work out eventually, and he just needed to be strong and hang on in there – that he had a bright future and she was looking forward to watching him achieve it. And Miss Walker sounded so completely convinced about it that Ryan couldn't help but believe her and just for a little while, he'd feel better about his life.

Then halfway through Ryan’s second year in Miss Walker’s class, she decided to become Mrs Clark and move to New York. She told him the news first, by himself after class, and she smiled at him. She actually smiled at him and told him it would be okay, that things would work out. She didn't seem to understand that she was crushing him by leaving, much more than his father had. Ryan had nodded at her politely, and walked home the entire way numb. He didn’t speak to Miss Walker the whole month before she left, trying to banish the butterflies inside him which had turned into a maleficent swarm, making him feel sick when he thought about her and how she was leaving him. On her last day at school, the class gave her a chocolate cake that someone’s mother had baked, and most of the kids gave her little presents that they had stolen off older siblings or lifted from the local stores or saved up their allowance to buy. Ryan didn’t give her anything, didn’t look at her, didn’t speak to her. He left as soon as the bell went, while the other kids were still halfway through ‘For she’s a jolly good fellow’, and he didn’t look back. It had taken him forever, but he finally understood it – that everyone you love will leave you in the end.

  
 

_Maelstrom_

The world is a maelstrom of flashing lights - red and blue carving through everything, leaving nothing unadulterated. Volchok’s face under Ryan’s hands has long since turned hideous, but the colours make it worse: dividing it in ugly sections, laying down a pattern of flame and shadow. Strangers swarm over Ryan and Volchok below him and over Marissa most of all, and everywhere there is shouting – an incomprehensible mess of words. Ryan lets go of the man, tries to make his way back to Marissa, but he cannot reach her through the disorder, and he is forced away from her, shoved into the back of a flashing car. Strangers are with her instead – touching her, allowing the red to reach her. She is in the eye of the storm, and all the panic swirls around her. Ryan is caught, trapped in it. A man is with him, dressed in calm; the forgiving blue. The blue is why Ryan doesn’t break him the way he broke Volchok, but he fights still, pushes against him to be near her, unable to express anything, to explain that he has to stay because she asked him to.

He is raging – a man made of chaos and confusion - unreasoning, unreasonable.

  
 

“ _I’m hopeful that this maelstrom has burned itself out.”_

His mother's first court-ordered rehab came when Ryan was ten. She had gone a little off the rails that summer and it had all eventually culminated in an arrest for a Drunk and Disorderly and a thirty day pass to a rehabilitation centre. It was a miracle in and of itself that the judge hadn't just let her rot in prison for a month instead of wasting a precious rehab space and limited resources on her. Ryan had taken that to mean that she had a good chance of recovery, but Trey had explained pretty quickly that all it meant was a nice little trip to 'kiddy prison' - AKA, foster care - until everything went back just the way that it was. Ryan knew that he was lying, though, because Trey's friend Eddie had been to the real kiddy prison before, and besides, they hadn't been arrested. So he went home with the social worker and packed a bag with his clothes and his toothbrush and the book he had to read for school, while Trey stuffed his full of Playboys and cigarettes and his bag of weed. Ryan watched his house disappear from the car window, and it felt like an era of his life was ending, like it had when they had left Fresno, full of hopes and dreams that were soon dashed by reality.

It was yet another miracle that Ryan and Trey were placed together in the same group home for that thirty days, and despite Trey's sullenness and total pessimism it wasn't such a bad place. Some of the older kids tended to hit when provoked, but it wasn't near the standard of hitting that Ryan was used to, and anyway, for the most part he got left well enough alone. Trey got into way more fights than Ryan did, and Ryan suspected that he started most of them on purpose, like he did at home. Ryan had always found it best to just stay quiet and invisible, but Trey had never been like that, not even back in Fresno with their father's belt. Trey had always been wild – a whirlwind of emotion and movement, taking out everything in his erratic path without thought to the consequences. Ryan just kept quiet and settled in, happy enough knowing that it was temporary and that someone was looking after his mother, even if he couldn't.

Ryan didn't know where to write his mother during that month, or even if he was allowed to, so he spent his time making 'welcome home' cards for her when she came back. It was the first he'd really bothered drawing for a while, but he made sure that no-one knew about it – especially Trey, who would call him a 'damn retard' for believing any of it and probably tease him for months, if he didn't rip the cards up. Trey, at fourteen, had picked up a real penchant for swearing suddenly, and he'd become a lot more violent. Picking fights with kids at school was the least of it, and Ryan had started to become really scared of the anger that Trey carried around with him all the time now. Although he had yet to really hurt Ryan over anything, Trey made him nervous sometimes, especially because he had started growing like a weed recently and towered over Ryan, who, they had both decided, was destined to be small forever.

Their social worker came to visit them after a couple of weeks and told them that their mother was still in the programme and doing well, which resulted in a couple dozen 'we're proud of you' cards to be hidden on the growing pile at the bottom of Ryan's bag under his bed. He knew she'd do her time and come out clean, because she didn't have any choice, but Ryan was hoping as hard as he could that she'd stay clean when she came out, and he wanted to be supportive, to let her know that he believed in her. He wanted her to realise that she loved him and Trey more than the drink and the mean boyfriends and do better for them. He wanted this storm – this unfortunate blip on the radar which had lasted his whole lifetime so far – to be over finally. He wanted a real family. But it was hard to stay optimistic when Trey kept saying she'd probably buy a bottle on her way home from the rehab place. Ryan just tried to ignore him, and kept himself out of trouble, and every night he'd lie awake in the room that he shared with four other kids and think about his mother and hope that she was thinking about them.

Thirty days and thirty perfectly crafted cards later, they were home. The house was small and dingy after the group home, which although crowded had more rooms than Ryan had realised a house could have, and was at least cleaned once a week. His mother was bright, though. Her hair was washed, her face wasn't pale and sunken and she was dressed in clothes that made her look nice, like a mom. She hugged Ryan as soon as she saw him, crushing her to him and whispering 'my baby, my baby' over and over in his ear. Trey just stood by scowling but when she released Ryan she grabbed him into a hug too. She apologised, she cried and she hugged them both again when Ryan shyly gave her the cards he had made, because he had signed Trey's name inside of them as well as his. They spent fifteen minutes putting them all up around the house on whatever surfaces they could find.

Their mother cooked dinner that night – only pizza, but it was hot and good and they all sat up eating and watching The Tonight Show until Ryan's head was drooping. Then Trey dragged him off to bed and ruffled his hair before clambering into his own, which was Trey's way of apologising for what he'd said. It was the happiest Ryan had seen his brother in a long, long time, and he thought that just maybe he'd caught a glimpse of what their family was supposed to be like that night.

It lasted thirteen days. Not even two weeks. It was a Thursday that Ryan found his mother passed out on the couch when he came home from school. He covered her with a blanket and washed out the empty vodka bottle and sat next to her, watching cartoons with the volume turned down low. When Trey came in later he took one look at her and walked right back out the door, mumbling something under his breath. Ryan stayed next to her all night. Trey didn't come home.

Just like that the dream was over, and it was back to reality.

Two weeks after that Jason happened, and then his mother was drunk all the time, and Trey started skipping school again and staying out late and getting into fights – while Ryan stayed home and did his homework and packed away all the cards he had made at the group home, some of them ripped and muddy and stained with alcohol, some with blood. And he concluded that Trey had been right when he said that no amount of wishing could make someone change.

 

 

 

_Whip_

Ryan doesn't calm when they take her away. Her absence is like a howling wind, whipping up his fury, increasing his agitation. He needs to touch her, to feel her under his hands. Her absence is an ache that cuts his heart in two. The blue is calm, but Ryan can't have it any more, not when his mind is clamouring. Strangers come to look at him next, while Ryan is fighting the man in blue, while Marissa is being taken away, locked in the back of a van, alone. The strangers tie him down and Ryan closes his eyes, feels his muscles bursting, his veins flooding with this torrent of helplessness. Their shouting is silence to him when he's deafened by his own thoughts – the whole tangled mass of them. And suddenly everything hurts, a deep, permanent aching that settles into his bones, swirls and eddies of pain thrown up by an unceasing gale. The strangers put him in another van, shouting at each other, at him, and the noise starts as they move away, a screeching wind that surges and ebbs, crescendos and fades. He lies still and lets it take over, banish everything else from his mind.

He is beaten – a man made of agony and doubt – unreaching, unreachable

  
 

“ _There is no person so severely punished as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.”_

The Christmas after Ryan’s twelfth birthday was spent in Chino Valley Medical Center. It was the day before Christmas Eve that Trey had goaded the Jerk-of-the-Month into a fistfight and lost, and Ryan hadn’t gotten permission to go visit him until his mother had drunk the evening away telling Ryan that he’d better not ruin Christmas Day the way his brother had ruined that one. Afterwards, Ryan cycled over to the hospital and he camped next to Trey’s bed for that night and the next because the nurses – overworked and underpaid as they were – didn’t have the heart to tell him to leave. Not when Trey was practically unconscious from all the painkillers and obviously had no other visitors. Not when Trey had arrived in the ambulance alone; bruised and beaten and collapsed on a street corner until someone found him.

Ryan went back to the house on Christmas morning just in time to open the one tacky and unsuitable gift his mother had bought him that year - which was still an improvement on the last - and force down a plateful of dry, reconstituted turkey and lukewarm tinned vegetables. By the time that was over and his mother and the jerk were steadily working their way through the Christmas spirit, it was dark outside and Ryan had to ride back to the hospital in the pitch black with no lights, hoping all the way that he didn’t get hit by a car, because their insurance certainly wouldn't cover that, or the beating he'd get because of it.

Trey’s ward was rigged up with paper streamers and cheap foil decorations and Trey was glaring murder at all the nurses when Ryan got there that night. Ryan sat next to him in silence, barely letting out enough words to answer Trey’s half-hearted questions about Christmas at home. Their poor attempt at conversation faded pretty soon after a few of Trey’s cynical comments and they were left to stare at the walls and the other children whose families had bothered coming in and bringing gifts.

Ryan felt sick the whole week that Trey was in hospital, knowing it was his fault and no-one else’s that his brother had ended up in there. Because it was Ryan who hadn’t done the chores that day; Ryan who’d forgotten the time while he was hanging with Theresa; Ryan who hadn’t remembered the unwashed dishes and the unmade dinner until it was way too late, until the screaming had started over at his house. He’d left Theresa sitting cross-legged in the middle of her room, eyes still closed from the kiss, and run out of her house, across his yard, up the steps – slamming the door open against the wall, in time to hear Trey taking the blame.

No-one had looked at him, except for Trey who had glanced at him with that glare he had - the one that Ryan knew meant to shut up and stay put - just before he told the jerk what he could do with the damn dishes and that Trey wasn’t his effing slave. And after that, no amount of protesting could get the jerk’s attention away from his brother and Ryan had been helpless to do anything but watch Trey take his punishment. And when the jerk was done – when he’d dragged a half-conscious Trey out of the house and thrown him down the steps - Ryan had only just managed to get to the toilet before he threw up.

On the Sunday after, Ryan got to the hospital to find Trey dressed in his own clothes, carrying a backpack Ryan knew to be his getaway stuff, which Trey had been stashing in Arturo’s room for about six months by then. Trey didn’t even bother explaining it. Why bother, when Ryan knew? That fight had been the final straw – Ryan had clocked that when he saw the look on Trey’s face as he’d taunted the jerk. And now Trey was moving out, leaving, abandoning him. Ryan wanted to plead with his brother to stay; to try a little harder; to take it one more time, but he knew Trey wouldn’t, and he knew he couldn’t ask him to, because it was Ryan’s fault that he was leaving. And Trey didn’t say anything – not even goodbye. He just waved, awkward, embarrassed, and walked away.

Ryan stared at the door for fully five minutes after Trey walked out of it, wishing as he had with his father that he would walk back in and say it was just a joke, that he hadn't meant it. He still felt sick. It had been a constant gnawing in his stomach since he'd realised that Trey was going to leave, that he had caused his brother to leave. His father leaving had been out of Ryan's control, so had Miss Walker, although he often wondered with both of them if there was something he could have done to make them stay. And now Trey was going, too – the last person in the world who understood Ryan, who knew exactly what he was coming from – and he had no-one to blame but himself.

That day Ryan went home and smashed one of the dishes over the jerk’s head as he was watching TV. For that short time he didn't care any more. He didn't care the hell he would catch for it, didn't care that the jerk might just kill him, because he needed the pain. He needed it to banish the guilt and the raw, burning misery that ate at him like acid. Nothing mattered except for that.

Ryan spent New Year’s in hospital, too, that year – with eight stitches to match Trey’s five and a broken arm to match Trey’s wrist. His brother came to visit as soon as he heard, and they sat in silence together. Trey didn't have to say anything. Ryan knew it. He wasn't coming back. On New Year's eve they sat and stared at the wall as the clock ticked out the seconds to midnight. And then that was it, a new year, and a new revelation - that pain doesn’t cancel out pain, even if it dulls it for a while.

  
 

_Melancholy_

By the time the doctor leaves him alone, Ryan is already sick of Kirsten's selfish tears and Seth's insensitive jokes and Sandy's condescending platitudes. Marissa is gone, away, alone. There are no words, no actions, no acts of fatalistic ceremony that can make it better. The red and blue both have faded now, sucked into the white which renders the world shapeless in its dull melancholy. It is encroaching slowly on Ryan, too, sucking away his emotions, trying to rid him of every last vestige of her. Even the Cohens are pale and incorporeal, ghostly figures around him. Their words fall into the abyss that the pills made. They have taken Marissa, and now they try to take his grief. But they can't take it, because it's all Ryan has left of her, a bitter mourning which runs in his veins, filling him outwards to his fingertips until everything, _everything_ is weeping at the absence of her.

He is fading – a man made of desolation and misery – unconsoling, unconsolable.

  
 

“ _There is no such thing as happiness, only lesser shades of melancholy.”_

Ryan is eighteen years old when he walks away from his second family. There were times that he was convinced that his life could be measured by the lessons he learned, and that he could be quantified by what it had cost him. Three years with the Cohens made him forget all of that. He should have realised it again when Theresa came back, or Trey, or with the letter from Dean Hess that almost ruined everything. But he was wrapped up in the lie, tricked into believing that colleges and careers and marriage and happiness were for him - not an intangible dream to be swept away by the wind. Now he knows that while the Cohens can promise that they love him, they cannot promise him a life. So after he signs himself out of the hospital, ignoring their orders and entreaties to stay until the doctor clears him, and after four hours of sitting in the poolhouse staring at the blank, unforgiving walls, Ryan packs up his green canvas bag and walks away.

The truth is that Marissa fooled him just as much as the Cohens did. A few minutes in her company and she began to peel away all the hard-earned lessons that Ryan had carried with him all those years. And after a while he just stopped thinking that she would leave. He knew that they might not always be together, or even be friends, but somehow he trusted that the strange connection they had would continue. They were like two planets orbiting around the same sun – following their own paths but never straying too far from each other. But Marissa left him in the end, just like his father and Miss Walker and his mother. Just like Lindsay and Trey and Theresa and the baby that was almost his who died and lived and then died to him again.

_Everyone you love._

_Everyone you love leaves you in the end._

Ryan doesn't really know where he's going. All he knows is that he's leaving, because he's sick and tired of pretending everything's okay when it's not, and when he's around the Cohens it's all he can seem to do. He walks down to the highway and hitches a ride from the first car that stops. It's going to Mexico and now so is he. When the driver drops him in a rundown village just before the border, Ryan walks into the nearest bar and buys a bottle of tequila. The barman looks at him – takes in his Levis and Ben Sherman shirt – and bets him he can't finish the bottle without passing out. Ryan walks out of the bar fifty bucks richer, disgusted with himself, but closer than he's ever been. He was fooling himself all this time, he thinks, pretending he could be the success that the Cohens wanted him to be, trying not to fight, not to get into trouble. The problem is that he never was the good kid. And no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he wished it, he was never going to change. He might as well finally accept it.

_You cannot change someone by wishing it._

_You can't pretend away the pain._

Three months in that village and Ryan is almost there. During the day he drinks hard, during the night he fights hard; letting whatever meathead who wants to try their luck kicking his ass. He doesn't care when he loses. He gets paid either way. Ryan makes himself forget about the Cohens, and about the future they once thought he had. Instead he remembers the lessons he learned. People leave. People change. There's no use pretending different. This is what he knows, the rules that are part of him, that make him who he is – the person the Cohens and he both tried to banish for three years. Here where nobody knows him, where Marissa is a shadow that exists only for him, Ryan can do what he needs to do. Here every shot slammed into his body is his penance for letting her die; every bruise his punishment for allowing himself to forget; every punch, every loss, every drink his remembrance.

Ryan tried it the Cohens' way, and it didn't work. All that's left is the Atwood way.

_Pain doesn't cancel pain._

And in the heat of the fight, when Ryan's mind is completely focused; when nothing exists but the cage and the hard floor and his opponent's fist; when Ryan can hear his heart pounding and his sweat dripping onto the mat, and the exquisite sting as blood flows; then, just for that moment, the pain dulls.

He has nothing left to live for but those moments.


End file.
